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24 hours on a rower – Thom Rieck Sets a World Record
By Thom | December 16, 2009
On December 11th, 2008 at 5:01 p.m. I got off a rowing machine and staggered my tired self into the history books. I had just beaten the previous rowing world record by over 26,000 thousand meters and set a new record for the longest continual row. This is a little post about the how/what/why I chose to take on this challenge.
The rules pertaining to the row -
As I wanted to set two different records I had to abide by a certain set of rules set forth by the world’s best indoor rowing machine maker – Concept2.
Let me explain a little about each record – first the ‘longest continual row’ is essentially how long a person can sit on a rowing machine continuously rowing. It could be 5 minutes or 35 hours…
Concept2 stated that I have to be on the rower for at least 50 minutes out of every hour if I wanted to set the longest continual rowing record. The other 10 minutes are not mandatory, but in order to not wind up a dead man, you want to take those minutes off, it’s a safety thing.
The second record that I wanted to beat was the ‘most meters accumulated in 24 hours’ – this is essentially the person that rows the most meters a time span of 24 hours wins. The previous record was around 182,000 meters. The rules are pretty open for this event, when the timer starts you go, you can finish whenever you want, but you only have 24 hours to get those meters in.
How I did it
I’ll break this down into several subcategories – my strategy, training, nutrition, monitoring, and documentation.
My strategy – I figured that I could keep a nice even pace if I rowed for 25 minutes, then got off the rower for 5 minutes (thus keeping within the 50 minute per hour time allotment). This was a lifesaver, since I had previously tried rowing for 50 minutes with a 10 minute break each hour. The 25 minutes tended to go by pretty fast, but obviously the 5 minutes was gone in an instant.
I was hoping to keep to a constant 2:30 per 500 meter pace – a very easy pace to maintain that would also put me at 10,000 meters every hour. This pace worked well until hour 15 when I started to slow down.
I started the row at 5 p.m. on a Thursday evening. This was done for several reasons. First, I had school on Thursday during the day, but not Friday. Second, it allowed me to use the building opening/closing times the best, since the building didn’t close until 12 p.m. and it reopened at 6:30 a.m. This also let me catch the rush of people that came through during the dinner time – both for distraction and my enjoyment of saying ‘hi’ to supporters. Third, it also allowed me enough time to get some good food into my stomach and digested before I started along with getting all my ducks in order.
The goal was to keep the heart rate really low and even throughout the row. My number to watch for was 135 beats per minute. This seemed to be my threshold for working hard/light. Obviously, you don’t want to expend yourself very hard right in the beginning.
Training – I like to joke that I started training way back in summer by riding my motorcycle long distances for little known reasons – like 1000 miles in 24 hours see here if you would like to read that story…
Really, I did start my training about August by resuming a good weight lifting and cardiovascular training program. When school rolled around is when I really started to train hard and be more focused. I would try to get on the rower at least 5 times per week, alternation between long rows, sprints, tempo and intervals. I wanted to be able to push my VO2 max (max amount of oxygen your body can use) higher, which would in turn help me be more efficient.
Every weekend I would try to do a nice long row, starting off with half-marathons, then progressing to 3 hours on the rower, then full marathons and so on, until I hit 100,000 meters or about 10 hours worth of rowing. This last 100,000 meters I did about two weeks before my official date – allowing enough time to taper and work out any problems that would come up in the real thing.
I was also teaching yoga and participating in several other group fitness classes throughout the week, so I found it to be plenty of preparation.
Nutrition - I chose to stick to a liquid diet (sounds rough I know) for the 24 hours. Manly I stuck to liquids because the rowing machine has a great way of folding you in half right along your digestive tract. Any solid food is going to really get mashed around, causing an upset stomach or worse… Also, I needed to stay hydrated since it was winter time in Duluth and the rowers fan was directed right back at me. I wasn’t dripping sweat, but both of these combined really took a lot of water out of me.
The two products that I really relied up on were Hammer Nutrition’s Perpetuem and Sustained Energy. Both of these two provided ample carbohydrates, proteins and fats to help me succeed. I actually gave them a call prior to completing my row since they deal with Ironmen, World Champions, and crazy people like me. There wasn’t a time when I felt sick to my stomach or a time when I ran out of energy.(This sounds like a sales pitch – it’s not, but if you mention my customer number: 129613 when you order, you can take 15% off – just sharing the love)
I also downed ginger tea throughout the row as ginger has been known to calm the stomach and ease digestion. Whenever I felt like I need some more fuel or a change from Perpetuem or Sustained Energy, I also used Hammers Gel, but it was few and far in between.
I had my backup caffeine ready at anytime just in case I needed a pick me up, but that was never needed. Actually I felt great mentally throughout the whole thing – no crazy visions or interesting zen moments. At one point, with about four hours to go, I did accidentally grab a gel with caffeine in it, only to realize it 20 minutes later. The whole time it was just me and the rower (and a whole crew of friends).
Monitoring -
Obviously taking on a big event like this can be dangerous. I had a Suunto heart rate monitor on me the entire time. We had the heart rate monitor set up so it would store the whole event in its memory so we could download it later. I couldn’t get the file saved, but it was neat to watch my heart rate rise and fall every 25 minutes when I would step on and off the machine.
I also weight myself every time I got off. This weight tracking was done to make sure that I wasn’t getting dehydrated, which would have severely ruined my chances of making it the entire time.
I also had a support crew watching over my health every minute to make sure I didn’t die.
Documentation –
This was the easy part. I have what is called a “Log Card” from Concept2 that logs (imagine that) all of your workouts onto itself for later recovery. I just plugged it in and let it do it’s thing. Also, there was a whiteboard set up so that every time I was done with the 25 minutes, I could tally the meters. This served to really motivate me and helped people that passed by see how I was doing.
Why I did it –
Mainly, because I could. Also, Concept2 was donating 2 cents for every meter accumulated during their Holiday Challenge, so I felt like like I was helping out a charity too.
The aftermath –
Well, at 5:02 p.m. I was ready to go home, find something real to eat, and take a shower. I did almost fell asleep in the car. Once I got home, I remember that the shower tasted salty (because I had so much salt on my body, yum!)
The real bummer is that I had bought a delicious organic pizza for afterwords, you know the one with nice cheese, prime veggies and a little spice to it. Well, after you do an intense workout, your senses are generally on fire – this spans back to when your ancestors were trying not to get eating by a Sabertooth tiger. So this normally delicious pizza was almost making me cry from how ‘hot’ it was. I shoveled it in and went to bed, sleeping for 13 hours.
O well… next time I’ll have to buy a different kind of pizza.
A big thanks to:
Rod Raymond for his insight, wisdom, and motivation.
Kenny Harkins for letting me use his Suunto heart rate monitor.
Nick Huisman for keeping me alive.
All of the RSOP workers (you know who you are), UMD’s RSOP in general, and all of the people that rowed or passed along by me.
You, for reading all the way down here
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Topics: Rowing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
January 19th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
WOW, Thom! I had no idea! Impressed is an understatement here. Way to go Fitness Guru Amigo!